Derek Lowe's commentary on drug discovery and the pharma industry. An editorially independent blog from the publishers of Science Translational Medicine. All content is Derek’s own, and he does not in any way speak for his employer.

Posts tagged with "Drug Industry History"

Drug Industry History

Thinking about molecular modeling, as I did in the last post, brings up another topic: when you go back to the late 1980s, in the real manic phase of the technological hype, what brings you up short is realizing that these folks were planning on doing all this with 1980s hardware. That puts things in… Read More

Drug Industry History

Molecular modeling is a technology with a past. Specifically, it’s a past of overoptimistic predictions (often made, to be fair, by people who didn’t understand what they were talking about.) Back in the late 1980s, when I started in the drug industry, modeling was going to take over the world and pretty darn soon, too. Read More

Cardiovascular Disease

Credit where it’s due! Yesterday I mentioned the original chemist who started the ezetimibe story, but I should note that the drug itself was synthesized by another former colleague of mine, Stuart Rosenblum. He and a host of others developed a huge series of analogs, which built in more acitivity and greater in vivo stability. Read More

Cardiovascular Disease

There’s a paper in the latest issue of Science from a team at Schering-Plough that may have tracked down how the company’s cholesterol absorption inhibitor (Zetia, ezetimibe) works. That news really takes me back. It’s been years now, so it won’t do any harm to mention that I used to work there. I had a… Read More

Drug Industry History

Last Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal had a very interesting article on the front page: “In Two Generations, Drug Research Sees a Big Shift.” It profiles Leo Sternbach, discoverer of the diazepams (Valium being the most famous) and other drugs, and his son, Dan Sternbach of GlaxoSmithKline. The elder Sternbach has been at this stuf… Read More

Autism

I wanted to take a moment to mention some interesting posts around Blogdom that readers may not have seen. In a response to the news on secretin for autism (see my post below), Dwight Meredith writes on what it was like at its peak of interest: Human secretin, swine secretin, herbal secretin (which as far… Read More

Drug Industry History

Whenever the topic of drug safety trials comes up, there’s likely to be a mention of thalidomide, and rightly so. As with any such event, you find various levels of knowledge among different people, even among those who believe that they have the real information. Stipulating that we’re ignoring the (substantial) fraction of the public… Read More

Drug Industry History

There’s an article in the latest New Republic on innovation in the drug industry. As far as I’m concerned, it draws good conclusions from faulty premises (which, admittedly, is a lot better than drawing bad ones from a good starting point!) The author, Nicholas Thompson, says that shares in the pharmaceuticals index, meanwhile, are down… Read More

Drug Industry History

My post from September 18th (“As Others See Us”) on Alan Murray’s Wall St. Journal column drew some interesting mail. I quoted a line of his: “Almost no politician in America is willing to stand up and utter this simple truth: The nation’s pharmaceutical makers have done more to extend and improve the lives of… Read More

Drug Industry History

I found some old pictures taken in my grad-school lab the other day, and sat down to look them over. It had been at least nine years since I’d seen them (and it’s some fifteen years since they were taken.) One thing that strikes me is how similar my hood looks – a mess then… Read More